With the development of Internet services, broadband networks, multimedia devices, and multimedia content, users have wanted to receive more advanced audio services. Further, a trend to develop audio codecs has also been changed.
For example, a high quality audio service has been developed based on a spatial audio object coding (SAOC) technique and an SAOC two-step coding (S-TSC) technique.
In this regard, Korean Patent Laid-open Publication No. 10-2010-143907 discloses a method and apparatus for encoding a multi-object audio signal, a decoding method and apparatus therefor, and a transcoding method and a transcoder therefor.
According to the Korean Patent Laid-open Publication No. 2010-143907, the apparatus for encoding the multi-object audio signal discloses a method for providing satisfactory sound quality to listeners by encoding object signals except for foreground object signals among a plurality of input object signals and encoding foreground object signals.